* It Takes A Lot Of Effort And Mounds Of Food To Feed Hungry High School Students.

September 04, 1996|by APRIL PETERSON, The Morning Call

The first day of school in the Quakertown Community School District. New notebooks and pencils, new classes and unfamiliar classrooms. There is tradition as well. In cafeterias across the nine-school district, children will lunch on a 13-year, first-day staple: French bread pizza.

Since 1984 when Chrisanne Ondrovic became director of food services for the district, students have received the lunch-time favorite on the opening of school. Pizza is familiar to all students, particularly those first-graders and kindergarteners in school for the first time, Ondrovic explained.

"We want to make it as comfortable as possible for them," Ondrovic said last week while her staff was in the crunch time of back-to-school preparations.

Each month Ondrovic prepares a districtwide menu. Food vendors then bid on providing those items to the district. Ondrovic's shopping list for this month, always the largest of the academic year, she said, reads like this: 1,500 pounds of ground beef patties, 2,000 pounds of chicken nuggets, 1,000 pounds of mozarella cheese, 1,000 pounds of french fries and 12,096 pierogies. Edibles are stored in the district's food warehouse at the high school and delivered to each of the schools. The district feeds about 4,000 students each school day.

"No restaurant (along Route 309) does the volume we do here," Ondrovic said with a smile.

About 42 food service staff members serve students between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. each day. Not all students eat complete meals each day, however. Some may opt for only a drink or a slice of pizza. Unless, of course, it's a "bar day."

Once a month school cafeterias offer a self-serve specialty bar such as taco, pasta or baked potato. The most popular is the pierogie bar, Ondrovic said. And, in keeping with the late-20th century concern about nutrition -- more particularly, fat -- the pierogies are baked, not deep fried.

In a study conducted earlier this year by The Morning Call, Quakertown district meals were found to contain an average of 31.5 percent calories from fat. The U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines for school lunches recommend the average fat calories for five to seven days of meals should not be more than 30 percent. Guidelines place total calories above 660. Quakertown weighed in at 705.5 in the study.

Ondrovic attributes much of the successful balance to preparing traditionally deep fried foods, such as pierogies and french fries, by oven baking. Most every meal also includes fresh produce of some kind from lettuce and tomotoes on submarine sandwiches to apples offered for dessert.

But children are not left out of the loop. Students tell food service staff when they like a particular food. They also let staffers know when a particular favorite has been absent too long from a menu. Sub combinations and pizza toppings often bring comments from students. Moreover, Campbell's brand is the only soup offered in school cafeterias because the students won't eat anything else. Ondrovic welcomes their input.

"They are the ones that are eating the food, so all decisions are made with their interests in mind," she said.